Stuck! Chapter One
by FurryNemesis
Summary: On patrol one evening, Ron and Hermione check the Room of Requirement, which maliciously malfunctions. Ron is clueless, and Hermione is pushed too far.


**Stuck: Part One**

By FurryNemesis

"Right. Tell me one more time. _How_ did we get stuck in here?"

Ron Weasley was trying very hard to press his shoulder blades through the stone wall. The cause of this was a simmering, not-quite-yet-furious Hermione Granger who was bearing down on him with a snarl on her face better suited to something stripy that lived in jungles. Furiously trying to think of something that wouldn't end in his castration or disembowelment, he blurted out the whole thing. Honesty couldn't hurt, could it?

"We were on patrol and you – I mean, I – insisted on checking the Room for people and now the door's vanished."

"Which means?" The snarl slipped slightly, showing more teeth. Very white, even teeth.

"Um, we're stuck in here?" The temperature plunged several degrees. "Er, no, wait, we're not, because this is the Room of Requirements and we can ask it for the door back, right?" Ron tilted his head towards the ceiling and screwed up his brow in thought.

Ten seconds later there were doors covering all four walls, the ceiling and most of the floor.

"You _idiot!_ What did you ask for?!"

"I said I wanted to get out. What?"

"There must be a hundred doors here! They could lead anywhere! How do you know which one leads back to our corridor?"

"It's easy! They all do! Look!" Ron grabbed a random handle and yanked it open. "Bugger!"

"What?"

"It's another room full of doors!"

"Well, try another!"

He did. "Nope. There're muggle clothes in this one. It's someone's wardrobe. Could be anyone's... Eww, granny knickers...must be McGonagall's."

"RON!"

He slammed it shut. Hermione was tapping her foot, her arms crossed and her lips in a thin line. Desperate now to get out before retribution occurred, he yanked over three more doors, revealing in turn a room full of chocolate (which Hermione insisted on investigating), a dank cave and a room that seemed to exist at ninety degrees to everything else.

Sighing in frustration, he turned towards her. "You try some, the right one must be here somewhere."

Twenty doors - and many strange and wonderful things - later his jaw dropped and his face turned white.

"Um... Hermioneeeee..." His voice was whiny with fear.

"What now? If it's another "occupied" honeymoon suite I'll hex your privates off..."

"It's got tentacles... lots of tentacles...my head hurts..."

Hermione strode over to Ron's door and slammed it shut very hard indeed, trapping a couple of squishy, sucker-covered green appendages between the door and the frame in the process. They vanished accompanied by a eldritch shrieking noise from the other side of the door as if ten thousand metal kittens were screaming in red-hot agony.

She turned to face him, a heaven-help-me look of exasperation on her face.

"Only a total, complete and _utter_ idiot would think of a door to another dimension as a way out of here. Didn't your mother ever teach you not to summon Elder Gods?!"

Ron was shaking with fear. "But...but..."

"Fine, I'll tell you. No pestering Cthulu!"

"...tentacles... blackness..." he whimpered.

Hermione blew her top. Too annoyed to waste time drawing her wand, she slapped him across the face. _Whap!_

Ron stood stock still for a moment and then passed out from the combined shock in a crumpled heap on the floor. Hermione, who was now sailing the unnaturally calm, clear waters somewhere on the other side of rage and frustration, huffed and turned away. Fool! She'd finish this by herself then!

Six doors down the line it was clear that this was going nowhere. Having severely confused a group of tourists in a sunny square somewhere and having shut her previous door but one on something out of Escher's nightmares, she decided to try a different tack. Asking the the Room for a normal (Hogwarts) lounge, she threw herself down into a large squashy sofa and took a gulp of recently-materialised hot chocolate.

Well, now. She was stuck, for no apparent reason, in a room that she strongly suspected had a mind of its own that refused to obey even the simplest request to provide a way out. Her partner in unintentional rule-breaking (and, occasionally, other things) was passed out on the floor with a none-too small chance of concussion upon awakening and she was rapidly running out of patience. Nothing was working. A simple command of "We want a door that leads to such-and-such-a-place" seemed to be met by obstinateness or downright refusal. Any request, however worded, of a way out inevitably led to what she could only call deliberate misinterpretation. She was far too annoyed to try anything else, not to mention too tired. The solution was obvious: they'd have to stay in here for the rest of the night.

Sighing in resignation, she pulled out her wand and muttered "_Enervate_" over Ron's shocked form. He blinked a few times and then sat up.

"What happened? For some reason I remember tentacles and then everything went black. Oh." He'd just noticed the new décor of the room. "Blast, we're still stuck in here. What's been happening?"

Hermione took another gulp of hot chocolate (which for some reason had undertones of Irish cream) before answering. Ron looked phlegmatic at the news. "At least we're not totally stuck. We can still ask for stuff like food and beds. Hey, what if we asked for a way to let the staff know that we're trapped in here?.

Bushy eyebrows were raised. "Do you really think I haven't tried that already? It gave me a horrible stuffed owl and a toy telephone". She tilted her head towards the ceiling and let out a sigh. "Ron, we are _stuck. _We can't get out, we can't communicate, I'm tired and Merlin know what time it is by now so we might as well bed down for the night."

"We could ask."

She closed her eyes. "I wouldn't, if I were you."

"Why not? Room, give me a clock."

There was a sound not quite like _sproing_. Hundreds of bits of metal rained down all around the room, bouncing off the walls. Ron picked up a 3/8ths parallel worm drive from the chaos and studied it.

"This place has definitely got a mind of its own. What do you think'd happen if I asked for a complete, working, perfectly normal clock?"

"I tried that, just before it tried to drop Big Ben on my head. It's almost as if it doesn't know what normal is."

"Only when we need something that helps us get out... You're right. We'd better sleep on it. I suppose we can get beds?"

"Cross your fingers. Room, give us beds. Normal beds."

_Whumpf._

"_Separate_ beds."

Two halves of a bed landed next to the four poster king-sized double and came to rest pitifully on their two legs. Hermione and Ron exchanged slightly embarrassed looks.

"Sleeping bags? It's not that I don't want to, but... you know... we're not... "

"Yeah... Sleeping bags."

The moment passed.

"Room, sleeping bags please."

_Flump._

_Flump._

_Flump.Flump.Flump.Flump.Flump.Flump.Flump._

"Help!"

"Mmmf!"

Once they'd dug themselves out of the drift of sleeping bags, it was clear that Hermione had reached the absolute end of her tether.

"We are _not_ using the bags." She pointed to the bed. "Get in, summon up some sleeping clothes or something and turn your head against the wall. I'm getting changed."

"Okay... but..."

She huffed pointedly. "Ron, don't get me wrong, you _are _attractive, but you're also an idiot. Don't get any ideas."

He half-grinned. "Fine, I'm an attractive idiot. Now, will the snogging partner of the attractive idiot please stop pouting? It's distracting."

"Fine."

Ron dived underneath the covers, wriggled out of his clothes and pointed his wand at them, intent on transfiguring them into pyjamas.

There was a bad noise.

Ron's robes disintegrated.

Simultaneously, from outside the covers, there was shriek. Ron, his male-driven protective instincts kicking in, leapt out of bed as though electrified to see Hermione facing away from him, hugging herself and still pointing her wand at the small pile of dust that had been her robes and underwear.

"My _clothes_!"

"_My _clothes!"

There was complete silence. Each eyed the other, Hermione doing so over her shoulders. Ron went beetroot. Hermione blushed scarlet. Her expression was frozen somewhere between shock, panic and fascination.

Hermione turned around. Slightly breathlessly, she said, "Room, dressing gowns._ NOW._"

There was a silken rustle and a heavy flopping sound.

Hermione's eyes went wide with shock and Ron choked on his own air. In the pile of almost-clothes on the floor between them were scraps of lace, and straps of leather. Vital, dignity-preserving parts were missing. Some of it was black, some was white. Certain parts were pink. There was a whip sticking out of the heap.

There was a _special_ kind of silence.

This was abruptly shattered by Hermione's ear-piercing scream of sheer frustration as she uncoiled herself and, gloriously, completely naked, sent a

stream of pure magic from her wand to strike the ceiling above.

"_ENOUGH!"_

Ron was awestruck. His girlfriend was _gorgeous._ Well-defined calves flowed into shapely thighs, leading in turn to a small, well-kempt patch of hair and then leading his gaze up a trim torso to the full, firm globes of her breasts. Dark aureoles encircled pale pink nipples, erect from shock...

The male mind has an unfortunate and occasionally fatal habit of being easily sidetracked. Number one on the list of distractions is the naked female form. However, when the cause of the distraction is incandescent with rage and too berserk to care about lack of clothes and then _notices_ a distracted, fixated male, chaos ensues. Emotional responses are heightened and very unpredictable. Temporary insanity has been known to occur, as well as extreme fluctuations in the metaphorical temperature of the surrounding space. For the male, agony or ecstasy irrevocably follows, these two states sometimes being indistinguishable from each other.

Hermione descended on Ron like a grenade hurled into a basket of kittens.


End file.
